CARPETBAGGER
"One day, when Branch Rickey was still doing business in St. Louis, a friend dropped in to the Cardinal offices and found him frantically rolling up the rug in his private suite.
'What's the idea?' the visitor gasped. 'You the janitor around here, too?'
'Judas Priest,' Branch panted, 'give me a hand. I just got word from Mrs. Rickey that she's coming home tonight, and if I don't get this rug of hers home and back on the parlor floor, I'm in trouble.'
Rickey was entertaining a business acquaintance with whom he wanted to do business. To impress him how lush affairs were with the Cards (they weren't at the time) he had borrowed one of Mrs. Rickey's Orientals and laid it in his office."
-Chester L. Smith in the Pittsburgh Press (Baseball Digest, February 1951)
THE WHY OF THE MAHATMA
"How Branch Rickey got the name Mahatma is a good story because it reveals so much about the complex character of an amazing man who has been as contradictory as any to labor in baseball's vineyards.
Tom Meany, the magazine writer, was telling how Branch got the nickname at Rickey's good-bye party for the New York scribes. Meany had been reading John Gunther's Inside Asia and in his first sentence on Mohandas Gandhi, Gunther had written of Gandhi as 'an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father.'
The evangelical opportunistic pattern of Rickey's ways was new to Flatbush then, but Branch had already revealed at least three sides of his many-sided self. Meany could not help but note what he had seen of Rickey was part paternal, part political, part pontifical. And so to Meany, and subsequently to all of baseball, Branch became the Mahatma.
No doubt Rickey likes the name because if he could be pressed to put into two words what he prefers to put into two hundred he might describe himself as a practical idealist."
-Milton Gross in the New York Post (Baseball Digest, March 1951)
BING MEETS THE MAHATMA
"Bing Crosby tells this tale of his first meeting with Branch Rickey, the new general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a club in which Bing owns stock and is vice-president. 'I had a golf date at Oakmont (the famous course just outside Pittsburgh),' he recites, 'but Roy Hamey (former Pirate G.M.) says to me, 'Bing, you've gotta meet this Rickey (then of Brooklyn). He's fabulous.' So I went. The meeting was to start at 11 A.M. My golf date was scheduled for 2 P.M.
'I think they were to talk about trading Johnny Hopp, but in the two hours I was there, we didn't get around to Hopp. Rickey told us how rough the plane trip had been from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh; how he had a boy named Marv Rackley who would be a marvelous catch for somebody; how his farm system had him worried. Then he went into a dissertation on pitcher Rex Barney, who had broken training. 'I loved that boy more than my own,' Rickey lamented, and then he turned to his own son who was seated alongside. Looking over his spectacles, he apologized, 'Excuse me, my boy.'
'So it went on, all of us charmed and delighted by this magnetic man. Then I looked at my watch. I got up to go. It was almost two o'clock. 'Where are you going?' Rickey demanded. I said I was on my way to play golf. He harumphed. 'Golf,' he snorted, and then he harumphed again.
'I said I'd send up a string orchestra on my way out.'
Later, Bing continued, when Rickey joined Pittsburgh, he called the crooner to assure Bing the Pirates would be in the first division within four years and would win the pennant within five.
'Don't worry about a thing,' Rickey consoled. 'I'll take care of the ball club- you just keep on with your singing.'"
-Art Rosenbaum in the San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, April 1951)
"Branch Rickey of the Pirates stirs up tales by the bushelful but suppose we pass on one concerning Irv Noren, the outfielder who is embarking on his critical sophomore year with the Washington Senators.
When The Mahatma ran into a buyer's market fifteen months ago with surplus Brooklyn-owned talent to sell, he tried to peddle Noren to the Chicago White Sox. It was no soap, whereupon Rickey commented:
'If you're not sold you shouldn't take Noren. And incidentally, I'm glad you're not. I intend to sell Noren to the one major league club owner who has never purchased a player from me.'
'And,' the Messrs. Chuck Comiskey and Frank Lane wondered, 'who might that be?'
'I'll tell you if you don't reveal his name until the deal is consummated,' the wise man replied. 'Clark Griffith.'
And up to that moment he hadn't even broached the subject to the Senators' owner."
-Rube Samuelsen in the San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, May 1951)
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